I used to go to school with a bloke, whose name I now forget, who used to come in for a lot of stick, kids can be cruel. He wasn’t into the same things as the other kids, his passion was football. He could reel off stats for almost any match, give him a date and he would tell you who played and who scored. His love of stats would have been perfect for this new PC game.

Football Director is a game which eschews fancy graphics to place you in the position of the new manager of a football team. You have a healthy list of countries and clubs to choose from, over two hundred, although I’m not that convinced that this makes much difference in the beginning. There are also some notable omissions in the list; presumably this is a licencing restriction.

Having picked your team to win the big one, you get started by playing friendly matches. This will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of your team. The friendlies also help to work out which tactics work best for your team. During this period you also get to flex your economic muscle, by selling off your dud players and buying some better ones. All this practice is to make sure you’re in the best position when it comes to the league matches.

When it comes to the matches themselves, the computer plays these out and presents you with the score, there seems little way of influencing it once it starts and I found myself just skipping to the end. The only representation of the match is a football bouncing around a representation of a pitch, although a commentary of the match scrolls along the right hand side.

The controls are intuitive and you access most of your options from the bottom of the screen. Graphically the game seems more suited to a handheld format rather than a PC and the game will struggle to tax even the most modest computer.

If your idea of a good time is tweaking player stats, rather than playing football, then this may well be a game for you. I could see whiling away a journey playing, but I’m not so sure that the game is suited to the PC.

6

Charles Packer